Meta’s planned $800 million AI data center will serve as the anchor customer for a 100-megawatt solar farm in South Carolina, the company announced today.
The project, slated for Orangeburg County in the central part of the state, will be developed, owned, and operated by independent renewables developer Silicon Ranch, in coordination with state-owned utility Santee Cooper, the local system balancing authority.
Central Electric Power Cooperative, a wholesale generation and transmission organization in South Carolina, will purchase the power from Silicon Ranch to supply its 19-member distribution cooperatives, including Aiken Electric Cooperative, which will directly serve Meta’s data center. Meta will receive all renewable energy credits associated with the solar farm, the company said.
It’s a framework that Meta and Silicon Ranch are already using to power data centers elsewhere in the Southeast. In Georgia the pair partnered with Walton Electric Membership Corporation to build a handful of solar facilities as part of the electric cooperative’s agreement to supply Meta’s data centers in the region with renewable energy. In nearby Tennessee they tapped the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority for similar, albeit smaller, projects.
To date, Meta and Silicon Ranch have executed 18 projects in the region, totaling more than 1.5 gigawatts.
Silicon Ranch, whose deployment model centers on partnerships with hyperscalers and rural electric cooperatives, is focused on developing increasingly large solar projects in the Southeast, the company told Latitude Media earlier this year.
While gigawatt-scale projects have long been deployed in places like Texas, much smaller-scale projects are the norm in the Southeast, the company’s COO, Boris Schubert explained. Thanks to the AI boom, though, that’s beginning to change; for example, Silicon Ranch is currently developing a 350 MW project in Georgia.
For Meta, this latest deal is part of its “all-of-the-above” energy strategy for its AI ambitions — one that includes not only renewables but also clean firm power like geothermal, and more controversially, new fossil gas.
South Carolina’s draw
Though not historically a data center hotspot, South Carolina has seen a significant increase in interest from hyperscalers in recent years, thanks in part to its location along the East Coast and a handful of business incentives including a sales tax exemption on energy.
In addition to Meta’s Aiken County data center, Google announced last year that it would spend $3.3 billion in the state on the buildout of two new data centers, including an expansion of its existing data center campus in Berkeley County. The state-owned Santee Cooper, which provides more than two-thirds of the power to Central Energy’s member cooperatives, predicts that it could need up to a gigawatt of new power capacity by 2030 to meet data center demand.
Santee Cooper is in active discussions to restart two shuttered nuclear plants in South Carolina and is working to build new gas power in coordination with Dominion Energy — both presumably to power new data center load.
But the question of how to price and manage power for data center customers is far from settled in the state. Meta’s announcement comes amid ongoing debate over Santee Cooper’s special tariff for large loads, enacted earlier this year.
The utility said the “experimental” tariff, which applies to loads over 50 MW, is designed to ensure the cost of powering large commercial customers like data centers isn’t shifted to other ratepayers. Under the new tariff, data centers are required to sign 15-year contracts directly with the utility, and to ramp up to their full contracted capacity within three years. Santee Cooper also reserves the right to charge those customers higher rates during peak demand periods.
Electric cooperatives are worried about the change, though, and argued the tariff could put them at a competitive disadvantage when bidding for data center customers.
